Dreamwork and Active Imagination
Melissa invites you to bring your dreams into your psychotherapy sessions.
Melissa invites you to bring your dreams into your psychotherapy sessions. Your dream life is just as valuable as your waking life, and can provide opportunity to pause, sense, reflect, question, or even journey further with imaginal landscapes, and living images. The process of dreamwork is an unfolding, not a guessing game for what images are. Presently, Registered Psychotherapist Melissa White, is undergoing two certifications with leading dream experts: Dr. Leslie Ellis’s Embodied Experiential Dreamwork with the 2025-26 Certification cohort, as well as Dr. Stephen Aizenstat’s Dream Tending and Deep Imagination Immersion Certification program. Both are deeply, immersive approaches that can be done in 1:1 psychotherapy sessions, or in groups, typically called ‘Dream Circles.’
Why Pay Attention to Your Dreams?
Dreaming is an important process that everyone experiences. Everyone will have dream experiences, often a few (3-6) a night, even if they don’t remember them. Sometimes people remember fragments of their dreams, and other times they may absorb epic, fantastical stories, or repeated fears. Many people have heard someone tell them, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a dream,’ or maybe even, ‘It’s just nonsense,’ to ‘It’s just your brain making sense of your recent experiences.’ While these explanations may be said to ease one’s anxiety or concern about their dream material, they can also minimize the lush content that arises from one’s dreamlife.
Vedfelt et al. (2020) details a list as to why we should pay attention to our dreams; 1) Dreams deal with matters important to us; 2) Dreams symbolize; 3) Dreams personify; 4) Dreams are trial runs in a safe place; 5) Dreams are online to unconscious intelligence; 6) Dreams are pattern recognition; 7) Dreams are high level communication; 8) Dreams are condensed information; 9) Dreams are experiences of wholeness; 10) Dreams are psychological energy landscapes. Another way to look at our dreamscape, is that it is just as important to our wellbeing, as our waking life.
Embodied Experiential Dreamwork
Dream specialist, author, psychotherapist, and teacher Dr. Leslie Ellis created a somatic, embodied way to process dreams and to use dreamwork in clinical settings. She is the past president of the Focusing Institute, and vice-president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Ellis integrates the process of Focusing, an approach founded by world renowned philosopher, and psychotherapist, who is known intuitive body sensations, or awareness, that he coined as ‘Felt Sense.’ Gendlin was an advanced student of Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, who is also known for his therapeutic concept of unconditional positive regard. Ellis’s Embodied Experiential Dreamwork approach utilizes elements of Focusing, that suggests the dreamer be curious about where it may be sensed in the body. There is an integration of embodying different elements of the dream such as, inanimate objects, animals, or other people, to help provide different perspectives on the narrative.
Dream Tending and Deep Imagination
Dream Tending was founded by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, who was the founder of the Pacifica Graduate Institute, a private institution that offers psychodynamic/depth teachings, Jungian approaches and mythology. He has worked with impressionable scholars, academics, and psychotherapists such as Joseph Campbell (comparative mythology and religion), Marion Woodman (Canadian Jungian Analyst), Maria Gimbutas (Lithuanian mythologist), James Hillman (archetypal psychologist). Aizenstat’s work in Dream Tending and Deep Imagination focuses on working with living images. In his book The Imagination Matrix, Aizenstat writes about accessing soul companions (living, dead, imaginal), shadow figures and helpers for journeying in the imagination matrix. The process of Active Imagination was initially explored and developed by Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Jung used Active Imagination to explore elements, environments, images, and characters who appeared in one’s dream. It’s a way to cross the barrier of conscious and unconscious, waking life and dream life, and to gain insight, awareness, and enrichment within one’s psyche and emotional states of being.
Dream Circles
Processing your dreams in community can be incredibly meaningful and helpful. It places an emphasis on collectivism, over individual processing. Dream Circles help foster connection through dreams, living images, and the unconscious. The Dreamer in a Dream Circle, or the one sharing their dream, can be seen as dreaming for the group. Feel free to reach out if interested in joining a dream circle.
Ethics and Dreamwork
Systems of dreamwork that assign authority or knowledge of the dream’s meanings to someone other than the dreamer can be misleading, incorrect, and harmful. Ethical dreamwork helps dreamers work with their own dream images, feelings, and associations, and guides dreamers to more fully experience, appreciate, and understand the dream. Every dream may have multiple meanings, and different techniques may be reasonably employed to touch these multiple layers of significance.
References
Dr. Leslie Ellis. (2025). About the Author. Retrieved from January 7, 2026. https://drleslieellis.com/the-author/
International Association for the Study of Dreams. (2025). Ethics and Confidentiality. Retrieved from January 7, 2026, https://www.asdreams.org/ethics-and-confidentiality/
Vedfelt, O. (2020). Integration versus conflict between schools of dream theory and dreamwork: integrating the psychological core qualities of dreams with the contemporary knowledge of the dreaming brain. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 65: I (88-115), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12574